Humility

I am not a very humble person.

This is something I am trying to work on - indeed, this is something that I am commanded to work on.  But somehow I seem to constantly coming back to the most basic of lessons.

Humility, in case you have forgotten, is "The quality or state of being humble".  Which leads us to Humble:   "Not proud; not thinking, speaking, or acting  as better than other people."

Which are fine definitions and of course most people would say that they suffer from neither of this - certainly most people do not consider themselves proud and the person who acknowledges how wonderfully better they are than others in public is often ostracized.

But in point of fact, I often operate in a very different way.

Take my average day at work.  My job function is such that I spend most of my time doing something in support of something or someone else.  Do I simply do this without complaint or do I grumble and think that I should be just as recognized as the other person or in fact this task is beneath me?  Or am I willing to do it only when it is for an important person and not everyone - or worse, for someone who I think I should be past and yet seems to have surpassed me?

Or at home.  Same problem, different group of people:  do I demand that I be recognized for my contributions?  Do I sigh when there are certain tasks to do or do I just do them?  Or do I consider my needs to be the overriding ones of the household that should trump all others?

You probably see where this is going.  And it is not pretty.

Beyond just the fact that I am generally a sinner, I think humility is especially hard for me because I have the grand sense that I should be doing something important with my life and that my current tasks and circumstances are such that this is not the case.  The reality is that most of my day is filled with tasks and things to do that never enter the consciousness of most of the people impacted by them - as I have likened before, my job area is what most people consider to be a form of automatic transmission:  best if it is working, better if I do not have to think about it at all.  This makes it hard, especially if one thinks that one should be of greater importance.

The problem - or perhaps better state the reality - is that none of us is called to importance.  We are specifically called to humility.  And so humility literally becomes a day by day activity, every day reminding myself for this day, this time, to be humble.  Not to think of myself as better than others or act in a way that is better than others or to treat myself or my interactions with others as if I am better than them.

I need to be humble.  It is just a shame I am sometimes so terrible at it.